The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is proud to host FAX, an evolving exhibition that started in New York in 2009. FAX invites a multigenerational group of artists, architects, designers, scientists, filmmakers and writers to reconceive of the fax machine as a thinking and drawing tool. Participants transmit their fax-based work via the venues’ working fax lines through the duration of the exhibition’s tour. Faxes by nearly 100 participants sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center form the core of the exhibition, with each institution inviting additional participants to submit works, which will then be archived with The Drawing Center’s collection to create an evolving document of all participants. Through the infinitely reproducible, yet erratic outcomes of producing works via the fax machine, this show displaces traditional notions of the hand that are still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and instead foregrounds drawing as a generative process.

FAX is a traveling exhibition co-organized by The Drawing Center, New York and ICI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by ICI. The guest curator is João Ribas. The exhibition and the accompanying publication were made possible, in part, by members of the Drawing Room, a patron circle founded to support innovative exhibitions in The Drawing Center’s project gallery; and by support to ICI from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Toby D. Lewis Philanthropic Fund, and ICI Benefactor members Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson.